Distance Education and Virtual Worlds — Some Issues
Apr 15th, 2007 by jeffmcneill
A student asked me some questions about distance education and virtual worlds, and I provided the following basic impressions (light on links, lets just get this posted for now). I think that research into the actual stats and studies would be of more help. Check out AERA and Horizon Report, and other distance ed stuff (some at the PEW Internet research site too).
Distance ed is growing quickly, and students are taking advantage of both time-shifting and distance benefits. The jury is still out on whether this is good or not, e.g., learning the same amount, same amount of preference/satisfaction. I think it is all a wash. Some students like distance ed, some do not. Some faculty are good at it, some are not. Personally I have had a bad experience with distance ed as a student, and the WebCT software is crap.
Virtual Worlds have not yet had much of an impact on distance ed, but I think they will. The main thing is not to replace the chat rooms in a web-based learning, but to have a greater sense of interactivity, a sense of presence and co-presence, and to do things that cannot be done either on the web, or in the classroom (very interactive environment, so simulations and visualization of information can be done in interesting ways.
Well, there are a few things happening:
1) Open, free, collaborative content: cnx.com, open courseware, wikibooks.org, and wikiversity.org
This I think is the first step, which is to get all the content up on places where they can be gotten at. This takes time, but there are great drivers of lower cost, higher quality, and scaling of the number of students that can be involved. Wiki and blog software, the proliferation of video (youtube, jumpcut.com, etc.) and the social media explosion are fueling this.
2) The next step is to have real resources (high-level programmers) thrown at an open source course management system. Sakai is from the perspective of administrators and so development is slow (universities are sharing resources) and it is not meeting needs of endusers (faculty and students). Moodle, which is by far the best project, is very crappy still, and needs at least a front end re-write if not back-end major engineering. Some kind of distributed improved Moodle system that can syndicate all information. For that we would need some kind of secure RSS to handle (private) course information across courses and institutions. People have already hacked that together a few years ago, and you can either encrypt at the server or run connections over SSL, requiring authentication. Either way that gets rid of a lot of the scalability problem.
3) Projects such as sloodle.com are trying to integrate Moodle and Second Life, and have some communication working there, so people can have access to the Moodle info while inworld, and there can be synchronous communication in the web and SL chat, etc.
4) The big thing that will take some time and resources will be learning content (e.g., see 1. above) for Second Life, as well as Web2.0 applications. This is the year of hypermashuping (if i can coin a new word), and we have youtube, itunes, blogs, wikis, etc. Again, it will take a while to build out these resources, but interestingly online classes continue to grow very quickly, even with the rather pathetic tools we currently have. Clearly there is demand and a lot of it.
5) What is slowing things down? Or rather, why is it going to take a while? A federal law made it illegal to force retirement at a certain age. Mandatory retirement policies were struck down and the average age of faculty has been going up ever since. Older faculty tend not to expand their teaching or learn new methods or technologies. Now of course there are some pioneers out there at an advanced age, but there is a high correlation between years at an institution and productivity, as well as adoption rates for new teaching methods and technologies. Basically, the faculty are keeping their positions while the next generation of scholars, scientists, and educators are waiting or go into other jobs. Un a few years a large number of faculty who have waited to retire, will do so (even though more just reaching retirement age themselves will wait longer as those ahead of them did). However, the lump in the snake will start moving out, even though the snake’s digestion will have slowed overall.
6) I see the continued uptake of online education and development of digital tools and content, as well as supporting different learning models. Personally, I like a hybrid online/face-to-face model myself, and am building these kinds of tools myself.
I rushed from Twitter to read this blog because I wanted to see if somebody was finally really analyzing and sifting through all the incredible hype surrounding education in SL.
And…I’m disappointed. I hardly think the problem is lack of mandatory retirement and old fogies. I think there are a lot of young people and not-so-old people who might question what the value-add is for virtual worlds and teaching.
It’s hard enough organizing metrics for learning in real life, of course, although there are things like “the Regent’s exams” or “the state-wide curriculum” or “the Iowa test” in the US, for grade schools.
How do you measure whether people actually learn (or teach) anything in SL? You don’t seem terribly interested in that question, but only interested in various software and hardware discussions — talking about, learning about, teaching about the technology itself. It’s very redundant and recursive.
I’d like to know whether SL works to teach physics. Or literature. Or geography. Or social studies. Or psychiatry (and please, spare me the usual memes about that sim where you can see what it’s like to live in “the world of the schizophrenic” — we need to get beyond that). In other words, do virtual worlds work?
Are they too distractable? Does the facility with which people can IM each other or go AFK to other windows undermine the effort of teaching? Can people learn in real time given the difficulties of sim performance, lag, hearing distances, Wednesday patches, etc. or is this medium perhaps better for asynchronous learning?
If you can’t get much text mounted on the notecards before the lag or can’t even hold text, if there isn’t any real functional whiteboarding (there really isn’t, not like a RL whiteboard with real easy collaboration), then…what CAN you show? I mean, we imagine all these replicating DNA or flood waters and emergency scenarious possible to make visualized in SL in 3-D streaming colour but…does anybody do this? (No fair mentioning Svarga or NASA — did any universities do it?)
I guess I’m looking for a lot more data about this, and not finding answers. Most importantly, has the virtual world of distance learning reduced the high cost of education and increased accessibility for those without means?
Aloha Prokofy,
Thank you for your comments and questions. Yes, I agree, I too want to know whether SL works to teach things that we normally have in a classroom or web learning site, or professional development, for that matter. However, I think that question itself is clearly under-operationalized. That is why we need to have learning content developed for Second Life before we can say anything.
I accept your criticism of my emphasis on the adopter profile of universities, but you yourself ask “did any universities do it?” (provide compelling learning content in SL). We cannot have this both ways. Either we are looking at a technology problem or a people problem here (of course, we are looking at both). Right now we have a predominant people problem, not so much a technology problem, though that is there as well.
The questions I was trying to answer for my student had to do with what is coming next and what can we expect from distance learning. Well, our next step is to build that educational content. Only then can we measure the degree to which learning will have achieved.
I also agree with your emphasis on the question as to whether (and to what degree) we can measure learning in Second Life, whether virtual worlds work for education. I take learning to be “transfer” which is the basic model in much of the research.
I do like the question of synchronous or asynchronous use of SL due to technological (and psychological) factors. These are the type of question which could be operationalized, and measured.
Yes, yes, you are correct, we need data. But first we need content. There are reasons we don’t have content just yet, but that content is being developed. Time for me to get back to that content development!
Cheers, Jeff McNeill aka Donnagh McDonnagh
I agree that the need for data is quite clear, but speaking from the perspective of an IT staff member at a large R1 university, the first step is to get administrative okay for the exploration of the medium. Proper evaluation of the effectiveness of any kind of material means that the material must exist in order to evaluate it, and the material won’t exist without the funding and institutional support for someone to create it!
I keep seeing this demand for proof that SL works for education, for distance learning, etc. It’s a perfectly valid and absolutely necessary demand. I just don’t think it is one that can be met yet, it’s getting the cart before the horse. When so many educators are just wrapping their minds around the medium, so many IT staff are evaluating the kinds of skillsets needed, software applications, hardware needs, and how to support faculty and students using it, and administrators are trying to understand how this is different from the media portrayal of shoot-em-up-video games..
There’s constructive criticism and then there’s just plain criticism. The truth is, IMO, we just don’t know yet. No one knows. We won’t know until all of the pieces come together, until the early adopters make guinea pigs of their students, until we systematize metrics and validation criteria, and until we can conduct research over a period of time.
9 out of 10 educators I know in SL are still in Phase 1: Moving In mode. One or two or a handful of people at their institution are just looking, learning, exploring, experimenting. They are struggling to get support from department heads, deans, and admins. They are learning about the limitations and possibilities of this particular platform. They are starting to write grants, attend presentations, and gather the resources necessary to just get started.
So give us a break. Some of us are doing our best to give you the hard data you’re demanding - we want it too! It just takes time.